New Year's Resolutions - Groceries

Were you supposed to be eating healthier in 2016? Have you fallen into the snack wagon? Eating healthy is always high up on the list of the most popular resolutions every year. Goals need details to stick, and OpenStreetMap needs details to grow. Let’s combine the two by adding and enhancing grocery stores in OpenStreetMap. Eating healthy often involves eating more fruit and vegetables. Where do you find those? In the grocery store!

Business listings and other points of interest are slowly gaining momentum in OpenStreetMap. Curious to know how prevalent grocery stores and similar businesses are in OpenStreetmap? Check out this table which includes a dozen cities known for tempting cuisine:

Grocery Points of Interest*

with Addresses

with Website

with Hours

Auckland

342

6%

1%

1%

Dublin

758

14%

4%

6%

Hong Kong

783

5%

2%

6%

Melbourne

1,624

13%

43%

5%

Mexico City

881

7%

1%

5%

Mumbai

150

7%

1%

1%

San Francisco

763

47%

17%

15%

São Paulo

1,046

22%

6%

3%

Seoul

2,292

2%

0.2%

1%

Singapore

415

11%

6%

5%

Stockholm

1,005

16%

14%

28%

Vancouver

203

39%

10%

12%

*SQL queries for those interested in generating stats for additional cities.

Seoul leads the pack with the most features where one might find groceries, but lags behind other metros like Melbourne, San Francisco, and Stockholm which include more detailed tags on each store. Lots of opportunities to enhance existing features and add missing ones!

Helpful Tags

If your personal food pyramid is not what you’d like it to be, get inspired by adding or enhancing grocery related businesses in OpenStreetMap! Need some help choosing tags? Here are some suggestions which link to their corresponding OpenStreetMap wiki pages:

Do not add extra spaces between two letter day indicators or time ranges

YES: Mo-Fr 06:00-22:00

NO: Mo - Fr 06:00 - 22:00

Separate more complex hours with a semicolon

YES: Mo-Fr 06:00-20:00; Sa-Su 08:00-16:00

NO: any other separator besides a semicolon!

Additional examples:

24/7

Mo-Fr 06:00-22:00; Sa-Su 08:00-16:00

Mo-Su 06:00-22:00; Th off

Looking for a helpful interface to help your format this tag properly? Check out YoHours

Where to Start

Do you shop at the same grocery stores on a regular basis? Enhance those first. Do you pass by a particularly fancy market that you’d like to shop at regular? Save those details in OpenStreetMap for future retrieval. Maybe you just need a kitchen gadget to get you excited to cook again! What is your go-to store for cooking supplies? Explore the OpenStreetMap wiki for the appropriate tags to accompany the new features you would like to add to the map!

Interactive Map

Would it be helpful to see where the current grocery related POIs are in OpenStreetMap? There’s a map for that! Hover over any of the bright blue highlighted grocery points of interest to bring up an info bubble with links to editing tools that can be used to add additional tags. (While you pan and zoom to your neighborhood, note that stores where you might find groceries only show up once you zoom in to level 16.)

Don’t know Dublin? Search for your city! Is your go-to grocery store missing all together? Shift-click anywhere on the map to open iD or open your favorite OpenStreetMap editor to start mapping!

If you are trying to decide between creating a point or a polygon to represent your grocery store, a point is great when the store is in a building that contains other businesses and/or residences. If your store occupies the entire building, digitize a building polygon if it doesn’t already exist and add your tags to it.

Editing with a Mobile Device

With points of interest, I bet you are interested in a mobile app to edit OpenStreetMap while you are on the go.

iOS users can check out Go Map!! by Bryce Cogswell. This free editor allows you to add features and edit existing features. Check out the Go Map!! wiki page for more details. Pushpin by Fulcrum is another excellent iOS editor for OpenStreetMap points of interest.

Looking for an Android equivalent? Vespucci by Marcus Wolschon is a great option. Check out the Vespucci home page for documentation and tutorials.

Get outside, increase your local knowledge, and share it with the world through your OpenStreetMap edits!